June 29 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"...for we know in part and we prophesy in part..." (1 Cor. 13:9).

Devotional

With all our attainments, how little we have really attained! With all our knowledge, how little do we actually know! How superficially and imperfectly are we acquainted with truth—with Jesus who is emphatically "the Truth," and with God whom the Truth reveals. "For now we see in a mirror dimly"(1 Cor. 13:12). All is yet but as a riddle compared with what we shall know when the shadows of ignorance have fled.

We also face the enshrouding shadows of God's dark and painful dispensations. We deal with a God of whom it is said, "clouds and thick darkness are all around him" (Ps. 97:2), who often wraps himself as with a cloud (Lam. 3:44), and to whom the midnight traveler to the world of light often has occasion to address himself in the language of the church, "you are a God who hides himself" (Isa. 45:15).

Ah! beloved, what clouds of dark providences may be gathering and thickening around your present path? Through what a gloomy, stormy night of affliction may faith be steering your tempest-tossed bark? Your faith, eyeing the promise instead of the providence, will steer that trembling vessel safely through the surge.

Remember that in the providences of God the believer is passive, but with regard to the promises of God he is active. In the one case he is to "be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10), and that the "Judge of all the earth must do what is just" (Gen. 18:25). In the other, his faith, childlike, unquestioning, and unwavering, is to take hold of what God says, and of who God is, and of what God is like, believing that what he has promised he is also both able and willing to perform.

Thus, grow "strong in faith, giving glory to God" (Rom. 4:20 KJV).

My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus' blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
but wholly lean on Jesus' name.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
all other ground is sinking sand.

When darkness veils his lovely face,
I rest upon unchanging grace;
In ev'ry rough and stormy gale
my anchor holds within the veil.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
all other ground is sinking sand.

His oath, his covenant, his blood
support me in the whelming flood;
when all around my soul gives way,
he then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
all other ground is sinking sand.

When I shall launch in worlds unseen,
O may I then be found in him;
dressed in his righteousness alone,
faultless to stand before the throne.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
all other ground is sinking sand.

(Edward Mote, c. 1834; st. 1 arr.)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.